VERSES FOR A CHRISTMAS FETE
The Lord and Lady enter, and speak these verses:
We bid you welcome to the hall!
There's food and frolic for us all.
At the intermission the Lord offers the audience the boar’s head,
All ye that keep the old law,
and ye that eat no lean,
the boar’s head this fair evening,
from our best cheese is ta’en,
Bedecked with bays and rosemary,
From our own garden just hard by.
the wassail, and the pudding:
All ye that drive and need to see,
this wassail bowl’s of spirit free,
and ye who would your spirits cheer,
your wassail take from this bowl here.
Lest man or maid might yet be glum,
The pudding, too, is soaked with rum.
So was Meg the cook, I'm told,
While yet the pudding was in the mold.
To end the intermission:
On with it, on, enough, I say!
Bear this heavy fare away!
On with the dance and merriment,
Bring on the rapper-swords well bent!
Bring on the cloggers’ merry board,
While pipes and fiddles tunes afford.
Bring on the maskèd morris’ mirth,
And songs of our Redeemer’s birth.
Let antlers Abbott’s Bromley crown,
And all the Muggle world, SIT DOWN!
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Author:
Robert Southwick Richmond (
Offline) - Published: December 25th, 2020 13:38
- Comment from author about the poem: I wrote these verses around 2000, when my wife and I were the costumed Lord and Lady of a Christmas fete of folk dances, music, and food, performed annually by Knoxville's Jubilee Community Arts. I spoke only in verse in this role, reciting doggerel verse (rimed iambic tetrameter couplets) I wrote for the occasion. I added some new verses every year, notably commemorating 9/11 in 2001. We also recited several old poems, covering breaks for costume changes during the performance. At the end of the show I recited the lines that end The Tempest, beginning "Our revels now are ended."
- Category: Special occasion
- Views: 14
Offline)
Comments2
A merry time!
Indeed it was! The role was created for us because Kathleen, one of the senior members of the dance group and the community arts center, became unable to dance because of her worsening osteoarthritis. We invented ourselves into the role.
I have two interests here, in magickal verse (or incantation), and in occasional poetry. I'd love to write the verses for a coven (along with being the sacred astronomy and ethnobotany consutant). And I'm a firm believer in hitching the winged horse of poetry to the market cart. I'd like to be the poet laureate of a town or city or some such organization, and write occasional verses on demand. Or maybe a court jester, or a private buffoon (as in The Yeomen of the Guard). Vesti la giubba!
I would avoid verses for a coven myself.
Actually, I would too. My only interaction with a coven was about 25 years ago. I found their tradition was much too authoritarian for this Episcopalian.
Just read these verses and - yes - they beautifully observe poetic metricity making them fully recitable and a joy to read.
Thanks, Michael Edwards! I had so much fun memorizing and reciting them, nearly 20 years ago. I even had to improv on occasion - once a baby was loudly heard from, and somebody's cell phone went off equally loudly.
Welcome the infant's lust yell,
No cell phones did their joys dispel.
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